


Intense

by avalonjoan



Series: Inside Your Head, Inside Your Heart [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medical, Emetophobia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Kent's a stubborn idiot, M/M, Past Kent Parson/Jack Zimmermann, psychiatry residents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 07:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19741342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avalonjoan/pseuds/avalonjoan
Summary: Psychiatrist Jack Zimmermann is finishing the last consult of the day when he sees a patient he knows in the ICU.  It's not the way he hoped to reconcile with Kent, but it'll have to do.





	Intense

Kent’s in the locker room, gritting his teeth as he tries to breathe through the pain in his abdomen when he realizes that he’s going to throw up. He shoves past Kelly, who’s talking about how she totally made out with the other team’s goalie last night at the bar, rushes into the adjoining bathroom, and drops to his knees by the toilet. All he gets up is stomach acid; he hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday evening. Sitting back, he rests his head against the stall divider and catches his breath, waiting until he’s relatively sure that he’s done before spitting into the bowl and flushing the toilet. He’s rinsing out his mouth at the sink, legs shaking, when he catches Kelly’s reflection in the mirror.

“You’re in rough shape, huh?” she says, arms crossed. “I didn’t realize you went that hard last night.”

Kent manages a smile. “Shouldn’t have had that second cosmo,” he says, hoping that she doesn’t point out that he was at the bar for twenty minutes, tops. 

“You gonna be okay on the ice?”

Kent nods. “I’ve got some nausea meds in my bag. Should be fine.”

Kelly raises her eyebrows. “Can I get some? I’ve played way more hungover than this, but that was the year we all got trashed the night before and lost the tourney.”

He remembers last year well. It was his third year of residency, and earlier that week he’d gone to an LGBT physician networking event. Jack had been there; he’d just finished his intern year and started his own residency in psych, which was...a surprising choice. Kent had had a few glasses of wine from the open bar and asked Jack if they could chat somewhere private. He’d told Jack that it wasn’t too late for him to go back to surgery. Against his better judgement, he’d gone on, telling Jack that he could still be a great surgeon, that people leave residencies all the time for psych stuff and then come back. He’d told Jack that he missed him. The conversation didn’t go well. They’d both shouted, and Kent had stormed back to the event while Jack left. The tournament had been the following weekend, and Kent drank way, way too much, trying to push away the memory of their argument.

“Yeah, let’s not repeat that.” Heading back to the locker room, Kent digs into his bag and pulls out a blister pack of dissolving Zofran, peeling the backing off and handing one pill to Kelly before putting one under his tongue. “Just swirl it around your mouth,” he instructs.

Kelly does as told, making a face after. “Is that supposed to be strawberry?”

Taking his water bottle of the seat of his stall, Kent squirts a bit into his mouth to wash the taste away. “I think so, but it’s kinda minty and weird.”

“Huh. You’d think they’d make it taste good, so you don’t hurl again.” Kelly shrugs. “Thanks, man.”

“Anytime.”

Pat pokes his head into the locker room. “Ice is ready,” he calls, and the team follows him out the door with Kent trailing in the rear. Every step causes a stab of pain on his right lower side, and he’s a little light headed by the time he’s at the bench. He knows that he shouldn’t be playing--it’s friendly tournament with the other gay hockey team from New York--but with last year’s loss and the fact that they’re on home ice this time, Kent can’t bear the though of skipping the last game, even though he feels like shit.

The team plays great, and even though the pain gets worse and worse by the minute, Kent scores a goal in the second period on a breakaway. He’s considering benching himself for the rest of the game but then Bree gets caught on the shit ice in one of the corners and goes down with a twisted knee so bad that she can’t even skate off the ice without two people helping her. He’s not going to leave the team with only one center, so he keeps skating. He’ll go to the hospital after the game, he repeats internally as he tries to keep himself from shivering, fighting back waves of nausea.

They’re tied at 2-2 in the middle of the third when everything gets fuzzy. Kent skates in the wrong direction, can’t find his way back to the bench, and the rink spins when he looks around for his teammates. He finally sees Mack and starts toward him, but his legs give out under him and he falls to the ground. Someone rolls him over and takes his helmet off. “Parse.” It’s Holly, gently tapping her palm again his cheek. “Someone call 911!”

The ice is cold against the back of his head. He wants to explain but the words won’t come. 

“Stay with me, buddy,” Holly says. Someone’s taking his skates off. “The ambulance is on its way.”

Everything goes dark.

* * *

The psych service has been practically nonstop all day, so of course, they get paged at four-thirty for one last consult. It’s the ICU (again), probably calling about another patient with delirium, which the staff up there really should be able to handle. Jack silences his pager with one hand while continuing to type with the other. He’s been doing notes for at least an hour at this rate.

“I’ll rock-paper-scissors you for it,” he hears Bitty say from behind him, voice monotone out of exhaustion.

Jack spins his chair around and shakes his head, standing up. “It’s ok--I got it. You’ve got your class.” Bitty’s been lamenting his upcoming CPR refresher class, not because it was difficult, but because it was entirely possible that it would keep him at the hospital until eight or nine that night. These classes go one of two ways: thirty minutes for everyone to do some compressions, deliver some breaths, use the AED, and take the exam; or two hours for the videos, multiple cycles of CPR, take the exam, and then go over the answers.

Bitty offers a compromise. “Let’s tag-team it. I’ll interview and you can document.”

“If you insist,” Jack says, leaning over his desk to lock the computer before leaving.

The two take the elevator to the top floor of the building and head toward the ICU. It’s always struck Jack as a waste that the best view in the whole hospital goes to patients who can’t even enjoy it. They find the patient’s nurse, chat with him, then go to interview the patient: a forty-year-old who’d been found after an overdose. He isn’t a great historian, so they have to skip through large portions of the history, but that’s a problem for tomorrow.

Bitty tracks down the patient’s doctor to go over their recommendations--stop the Ativan, reorient frequently, don’t give Haldol before bringing psych back to check in--while Jack enters everything into the medical record. They reunite at the front desk after a few minutes--it’s almost exactly five o’clock, so if they go right back to the office, they can sign out to the night doc and be on their way by five-fifteen.

For some reason--curiosity, maybe, a look into a field so unlike his own--Jack always glances at the various patient rooms when he leaves the department. The patients are mostly older, many are sedated and intubated, but a few are upright and talking to someone in their room. They’re a few doors down from the exit when Jack gets a glimpse of a younger patient--a young man about his age. He’s about to press the button to open the department doors when he sees the name written on the room number placard: Parson.

There’s a moment where he’s sure that he’s going to collapse, but he catches himself, leaning against the wall, his chest tight.

“You okay?” Bitty’s hand is on his back, the other man looking at him with wide, concerned eyes.

“I—” Jack struggles to form a sentence, to get a breath in. “I have to—” He swallows before turning around and actually jogging back to the nurses’ station. Contrary to what every medical show would suggest, people rarely move faster than a power walk in the hospital. Not even the code team runs.

His whole body vibrating, Jack gets the attention of the nurse they’d spoken to before and asked for Kent’s nurse. What seems like minutes pass before another nurse arrives to tell him about Kent. Technically, Jack has no right to get this information, but people are pretty lax about telling providers about patients other than their own. When the nurse speaks, Jack’s mind is racing too much to catch everything, but he gets a few key words: appendicitis, sepsis, respiratory failure, intubated, antibiotics, pressors, extubated. Stable.

Jack nods in thanks, spins around and walks back to the room. He brushes right past Bitty, who’s been standing a few feet behind him, without saying a word. Bitty will understand.

As the nurse had indicated, Kent looks...ok. He has IV antibiotics running, and a heart monitor showing a regular rate and rhythm, and his blood pressure is where it should be. There are other numbers on the monitor, but Jack doesn’t remember anything about end-tidal CO2 because he’s a fucking psychiatrist and forgot all of his critical care medicine years ago.

Hesitating for a second, Jack gently touches the side of Kent’s face--no fever now, that’s good--before running his fingers through the other’s hair. His heart lifts when Kent stirs, his eyes fluttering open.

“Hey, bud,” Jack says, “Can you hear me?” Kent doesn’t reply, his eyes closing again. Jack keeps stroking Kent’s hair--he’d always liked that. 

There’s a knock on the doorframe, and Jack jumps, pulling his hand away. Bitty steps inside, looking sympathetic--beyond the practiced, trained way that he would look at a patient. He walks around the bed and stands near Jack, looking toward Kent. “How is he?”

“They say it looks good?” Jack says, trying to sound hopeful.

Bitty nods, then tilts his head toward the door. “I’m going to sign out to Lardo, if you wanna give me your patient list.”

Jack shakes his head. “I can do it.”

“Seriously--stay.” Bitty puts his hand on Jack’s chest with a noticeable amount of resistance.

“OK.” He isn’t going to resist. He can’t. After fishing out his notes from the day and handing them to Bitty, he murmurs his thanks.

Bitty nods, and Jack expects him to turn and leave, but he doesn’t. “Do you want a hug?” 

It takes Jack off guard, but yeah, he does. He nods quickly, and Bitty wraps his arms around him. For his small stature, Bitty’s surprisingly muscular, and his embrace is firm. Jack hugs him back, and somewhere in there, starts to cry, trying to stop with little hitching breaths. 

“You’re okay.” Bitty rubs Jack’s back with one hand. “You’re alright.”

Turning his face away from Bitty’s neck, Jack manages to say, “I just--the last time I saw him--I yelled at him--I didn’t think—”

Bitty squeezes Jack before pulling away just enough to make eye contact. When he speaks, his voice is hushed. “Is he the ex you were telling me about?”

It feels so far in the past that Jack’s almost forgotten that he’d told Bitty. He’d shown up to work one morning, eyes visibly puffy and red from the panic attack he’d had before he cried himself to sleep, and Bitty had waited until they were alone in the office before gently asking if everything was alright. And because Shitty was out of town and he didn’t want to alarm his parents, he hadn’t told anyone yet, so he unloaded everything on his colleague, being careful to avoid gendered pronouns when talking about Kent.

Jack nods, bringing up a hand to wipe off his cheeks. “Yeah.” After a second, he adds, almost as an afterthought, “I’m not out.”

With a small smile, almost a smirk, Bitty replies, “Me neither.”

Jack lets out a breath of laughter and smiles in earnest. “Looks like we’ve got more in common than I thought.”

“It sure does.” Bitty touches Jack’s arm and glances at the clock on the wall. “I’m gonna scoot, but I’ll swing by after my class to see how you’re doing, okay?”

“Please,” Jack says, taking a deep breath, trying to hold onto the calm that Bitty had brought on. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.” 

As soon as he hears the doors to the ICU click shut, Jack bends over, covering his mouth so that the staff won’t hear him cry. He sinks down into a crouch, his other hand on the back of his head as he tucks himself up into the smallest space possible. He can’t stop thinking about everything they’d said that night--mean, awful things, things that burned bridges, things that cut at their past as well as the present. If he’d never seen Kent again after that, he honestly wouldn’t have missed him. But this--this brings everything back, and suddenly he loves Kent more than ever, forgives him for everything, would do anything to have him back.

At some point, he stands up, gets himself together, and perches on the edge of Kent’s bed. He wants to curl up next to him, to hold him close like he used to. For a second, he considers doing just that, but there’s no way that they’ll both fit in the bed, although the thought makes him realize how tired he is. It’s only eight, but the winter sun has been down for hours, and damn, crying takes up a lot of energy. There’s a chair in the corner of the room that doesn’t look remotely comfortable, but it’ll have to do. Keeping his white coat on to guard against the air conditioning, he sits down, crosses his arms, and leans his head against the wall. Mercifully, sleep comes before he can obsess over their last conversation any more.

He wakes to the sound of hushed voices.

“Oh lord, no--I’m with psych--let me grab your nurse.”

Bitty is standing next to the bed, and just past him, Jack can see Kent, eyes open, talking, albeit slowly and quietly. “Why?”

“She’ll want to--oh, why I’m here. I’m, uh--I’m here checking on Jack.” Bitty steps back, and Jack sees an honest-to-god smile on Kent’s face.

Jack stands up, surprised to find that someone had draped a blanket over him while he slept--Bitty, he’s sure--and shrugs it off before closing the space between him and Kent. “Kenny,” he whispers, voice rough from crying, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You scared the hell out of me.” He smooths Kent’s hair, then runs his fingers down the side of his face. 

God, Kent is beautiful, even more so at this particular moment. Jack doesn’t want this to turn into a bedside reconciliation--this isn’t about him, this is about Kent--but the words come anyway.

“I’m sorry. For everything.”

Kent nods, an almost imperceptible movement. “Me, too.”

After a moment, Bitty clears his throat and puts a hand on Jack’s upper arm. “I’m gonna head home--I left a bagel and some cream cheese over on the windowsill--the cafeteria was closing but I figured it was better than nothing.”

“Thank you.” Jack turns away from Kent to hug Bitty. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“It was the least I could do.” Bitty’s voice is muffled against Jack’s shoulder before he pulls back. “Take care of yourself, alright?” Jack nods. “I’ll see you in the morning?”

Jack knows that Kent is in good hands, but after all this, he’s willing to spend the night in an uncomfortable chair just to stay by his side. Jack gestures toward himself. “Just so long as you don’t point out to anyone that I’m gonna be wearing the same thing I wore today.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Bitty moves toward the foot of the bed and looks at Kent. “I’m glad to see you’re doing better.” And with a little wave, he’s gone.

After dragging the chair closer to the bed, Jack sits back down and takes Kent’s hand into his. He doesn’t say anything; Kent’s nurse will be in to assess him soon, and Kent’s closed his eyes again. Leaning over, Jack presses a kiss to the back of Kent’s hand, and he’s almost positive that he sees a smile on the other’s face.

* * *

Kent gets better. Two days later, they move him to the step-down unit, and Jack come with him, curling up on the too-small in-room couch to sleep at night. Two days after that, they send him home with a week of oral antibiotics and an appointment with the surgeon to get his appendix out once it ‘cools down.’ Jack insists on going home with him, saying that someone has to make sure Kent actually takes it easy while he recovers. Kent protests, but not much.

It’s a glimpse of what their life together might have been if they stayed together. Jack cooks for Kent, and lets Kent fall asleep with his head in Jack’s lap, and dutifully monitors Kent’s temperature. He scolds Kent when he finds out the reason he didn’t go to the hospital sooner. And even though the couch is long enough for Jack to sleep on, Kent offers him the other side of his own bed. Jack takes it, telling Kent that it’s ‘just in case he needs something during the night.’ It’s nice.

A week later, the night before Kent goes back to work, they face each other in bed and actually talk. There are apologies, tears, and gentle touches: hands pressed to cheeks, fingers tracing over lips. And finally, an agreement--it wouldn’t work. It never would have worked. But friends--they could do friends. They fall asleep in each other’s arms one last time before Kent leaves at five AM for surgical rounds. 

**Author's Note:**

> I switched verb tenses and POVs like a million times when I was writing this, so feel free to point out places where I goofed.


End file.
